Rails3: How to recreate test fixtures based on development database schema (newbie)

Question

The situation: I used generate scaffold to set up my objects in a new Rails project. Besides doing some migrations, I also directly edited the MySQL tables by adding and renaming columns etc. Now I can't get tests to run because the automatically-generated fixtures do not correspond to the database schema. Perhaps they're based on the original definitions plus migrations, and my migrations to not completely describe the new structure.

I discovered I could use "rake db:test:clone_structure" to duplicate the tables in the test database (db:test:prepare apparently creates them from the migrations?), but I can't figure out how to get the fixtures created from the development schema rather than from the migrations (or whatever is happening).

I got as far as seeing that there is a Fixtures.create_fixtures method, but where would I put it and how would I use it to regenerate all my fixtures?

Answer 1

When working with rails you never do this - "directly edited the MySQL tables by adding and renaming columns" You create migrations

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/migrations.html